Kristen Fife is a health care sourcing recruiter in the greater Seattle area. She has been in recruiting since 2004, when she was hired as a contract Researcher for the Microsoft Strategic Recruiting Group, the technical executive recruiting team. From there, she moved into full lifecycle agency recruiting for Volt Technical Services working on the Microsoft account hiring contract software test professionals. After her agency stint, she returned as a contractor to Microsoft. Kristen was involved in both technical and legal sourcing, and she also completed a contract as a full life-cycle Staffing Consultant for Microsoft Research.

In addition to Microsoft, Kristen has worked for smaller Seattle technical companies such as Varolii and bSquare. She moved into healthcare in 2009 and is responsible for sourcing strategies for all medical positions with the exception of physicians. Her current focus is leveraging Social Media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. to connect with the Millennial (GenY) group. She also volunteers her time as a moderator for the Human Resources Professional Network on Yahoo Groups (over 3700 members worldwide) and has blogs on the Electronic Recruiting Exchange and one for job seekers on issues such as resume construction, job hunting, and understanding the role of recruiting in the job hunting process.

Kristen has been interviewed for several national publications as an SME on issues related to recruiting including ABCNews, AOL, and The Wall Street Journal. She was the keynote speaker for the Gonzaga Alumni Mentoring Program for three years and often gives presentations to SIG’s and job seeker groups.

Sourcing, for Kristen, is like a puzzle. Competitive Intelligence and passive candidate generation are fun activities for her, and she enjoys connecting with the candidates as a first contact and setting the stage for establishing and nurturing long-term relationships. In today’s economy, Kristen tries to help as many people out as possible to understand best practices for job seeking and resume construction. Her basic philosophy is that building communities and networking are the keys to recruiting in the next five years.